User Guide 1.12 - simibubi/TheMightyArchitect GitHub Wiki

User Guide

Here's all you need to know to make amazing builds with any existing theme out there.

• To begin the process, hit the Keybind for bringing up the Architect's Menu, this is set to [G] by default.
• Choose a theme by hitting one of the number keys shown on the Menu. You will now enter the first phase.

The Composer

Blueprint vision enabled! In this phase you will be drawing shapes to specify room space in the final result.
There are Two types of tools to be used in this phase, Drawing tools and Selection tools, switch between them using the Arrow Keys.

• The Room Tool allows you to start a new stack of rooms. By clicking on the ground twice in different locations, you mark a rectangle to be built upon. This rectangle may have size limitations depending on what types of roof are supported in the theme you are using. After drawing a room you can use your Mouse Wheel to give it some more floors above.
• The Cylinder Tool, similarly to the room tool, creates new parts of the building. These are special in their appearance though, as they will use the themes Tower Designs, a completely separate set of walls and roofs that are cylindrical. Note that not every Theme supports towers, in that case the tool will not appear in the composer.
• The Selection Tool let's you click any of the drawn stacks and modify some behaviour and looks of them. It will bring up a GUI showing every room in the stack and its properties. Don't worry, I'll briefly explain all the buttons and things.

• Let's start with the buttons up top: Leftmost are buttons to add and remove rooms from the stack, similarly to the Mouse wheel shortcut after drawing them.
• To the right of them, you can choose the type of roof you would like to appear on top of the stack, or whether it should stay without one (rightmost). Note that, with certain sizes of the room, gable roofs may become unavailable as they cannot cover an infinitely wide facade.

Now lets talk about the Type/Style section, together with the positioning fields, these will appear individually for every room in the stack. Settings applied here will mostly be carried over to the next added rooms, therefore I suggest you edit these before adding more rooms to the Stack.

• Themes are subdivided into several Style types. Designs from one style type will not appear in others. It would look strange if you suddenly found an open balcony facade placed where your foundation should've been! Therefore, with the Type field, you can scroll through the supported style types of the theme. By default, Foundation gets assigned to the lowest room, and Regular to anything on top of it. This is completely up to you though. Why not put a foundation on top instead?
• The Style fields are a lot more specific, and are completely optional, unless you need some more control on the design picking.
  The Palette Group (left field showing "1st") denotes whether the designs will be colored in by the Primary or the Secondary Palette. You will be picking the material palettes later on in the process, but in case you need a room or stack colored in differently from the others, you can specify "2nd" and choose the respective palettes afterwards.
  The Style Group (right field showing "A") gives you some control over which faces should look alike structure wise. Picture the Architect using a random design for every single room, you can tell him to with the "U"nique group setting, but it will look very strange, the building will be a cluster of slightly different styles on each room. So, in order avoid this in general, rooms and towers in the same style group (A-D) will receive the same designs for each size that is queried. For instance, a 7x4 Wall on top of another will look the same in the same style group.

Position and Size (right section of the room settings)

• These fields should speak for themselves really, scroll on the numbers to re-position or re-size the rooms. You will notice that anything you change here (except vertical size) will carry over to rooms above. Therefore, if you want to resize an entire Stack you only have to resize the room on the very bottom of it.
  Also note that the moving operations are pretty unrestricted, you can shift rooms into others, make them float or move them below the world. Please understand that the resulting exposed faces will not be covered with roofing or supports. If you're getting creative with the re-positioning and re-sizing within a stack (please do), you may need to fill in a few gaps in post.

Draw and modify the rooms and towers as much as you please, and whenever you're happy, hit [G] + [F] to continue. You can always come back here should you want to add rooms in after.

The Preview

Shortly after, almost magically, your building gets decorated. A hologram of it will appear hopefully somewhere around where you drew the rooms. This hologram is not visible to other players on a server, remember that this feature of the mod is purely client-sided and does not require the mod installed on the server. You can also freely walk/fly through this visualization.
From here you will find plenty of options in the Architect's Menu (G). Technically you could get right to exporting it if you're happy with what it is. Find out below what options you have.

Choosing a palette

If you haven't known yet, these materials are not what you have to stick with!
From the preview, hit [G] + [C] to open the Palette Picker. Here you can choose your primary and secondary Palette for the building. Left-click on a swatch to assign it as primary (R-Click for 2nd), close it and you'll see the hologram updated.

Modifying a palette

• Key Point for modifying a palette: Markers for the individual palette entries will appear on the highest block at your position in the world. I suggest you prepare a 9x9 area to stand in beforehand.

If you want to tweak one of the existing palettes a little (or remake one entirely), assign it to primary and hit the little [+]-Button in the "My Palettes" section. More ghost blocks will appear on the ground below you, showing what blocks are currently assigned to the various palette entries. Hover over them to get a description of whereabouts it generally appears in a building.
Now you can just go ahead and place your favourite blocks into these spaces to modify the palette. The hologram will update with every block you change. You can Save or Discard the progress in the Architect's Menu. If you save it, your new palette will be assigned automatically, and will appear in the picker GUI for any of your future builds, unless you delete it from the file system. Once you're done here you will re-renter the Preview Mode.

Exporting your build

All done? Then it's time to make this vision reality. Here's what you can do:

• In Singleplayer, you can always just Print your structure into the world. This will place it exactly where it is in a matter of ticks. This is also handy if you would like to add a few finishing touches yourself, before turning it into a schematic with other Tools.
• As of TMA 0.2.1, Operators on a Server can also print the structure, using a massive chain of /setblock commands as a backbone. This may take a few seconds depending on how ridiculously oversized your structure may be. =)
• Otherwise you can always export your structure to the classic Minecraft .nbt format to be used with Schematica, for instance. Note that Vanilla Structure Blocks can only import structures with dimensions somewhere below 30x30x30m, any other structure importer should work just fine with the Architect's files. Enjoy!

That's it! This should be all the knowledge required to make awesome things together with The Mighty Architect!
Thanks for your interest, I'll be happy to see your creations!~

Pro tips for the mighty ones

• When drawing rooms in the composer, it usually yields better results whenever one intersects rooms rather than putting them next to each other. A cross shape of two perpendicular longer rooms for example works out pretty well! Don't worry about the walls intersecting, they will be cleared out by the interior, so there shouldn't be any facades on the inside of your build.
• Making layers only one meter high in the composer can sometimes call for special behavior: In the medieval and modern theme it creates a nice trim breaking up the floors a little, while the Town House theme creates a full balcony around whatever layer comes next!
• Creating a one meter high open arcs layer in the Medieval theme creates a loop of railings, which can be quite nice to top off a stack of rooms with. Don't forget to disable the roof for that stack!
• When creating a new palette you can still re-roll the designs of the previewed build. This can be handy to make sure the palette look nice in different arrangements.

What is happening?

A little bonus on the inner workings was promised, here you go:
Behold! the Medieval Theme design collection:

In the Architect's Guide you can read up on how to make your own Theme for the Architect, it's not as difficult as it might seem!